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Tuesday, August 25, 2009

The Projects are Available for Viewing

I am in the process of populating blog pages with the Star Frontiers game books I am working on, showing the game information I have gathered so far. Currently, it looks very sparse, but I assure you that I have plenty of work already done on many of the chapters in many of the books.

To view them, go to the bottom of my profile (links are in no particular order) or to the list of Rulebooks and Campaign Books in development at the bottom of the Project List from July, 2009 and click the project link you wish to go to.

Wednesday, August 12, 2009

Lost in Space

I was reading a couple of threads at StarFrontiers.us about cut scenes in roleplaying (though they're not actually what filmmakers call "cut scenes", they are sequences; a cut scene is actually a scene in which different camera angles, facial reactions and action shots are pasted together in quick succession to express the story in that scene) and in the thread The Frontier in Flames, Umungus said he liked stories that start out with devastation, so I got what I think is a pretty cool idea: start the adventure in the middle and use cut scenes to go back and revisit the story that lead up to that scene. That is, the characters are already established in the setting, and the starting section is perhaps right at the beginning of a battle or right after, and then those roleplaying breaks go back to the beginning and lead up to that point, or perhaps resolve in reverse order, while the adventure continues in chronological order simultaneously from the starting point. (Think of the show "Lost") Like so:

Referee's Prologue
Scene 5
Scene 1
Scene 6
Scene 2
Scene 7
Scene 3
Scene 8
Scene 4
Roleplaying Epilogue

Or for an anachronistic regression:

Referee's Prologue
Scene 5
Scene 3
Scene 6
Scene 4
Scene 7
Scene 2
Scene 8
Scene 1
Roleplaying Epilogue

I put 3 before 4 in the regression in order to space out the opener from the scene that leads to it so that you do three sections before you ever get to the scene that explains the opening.

The way to explain how the characters have full health and equipment at the beginning (Section Epsilon) is that they were given healing and equipment in Section Delta. Also, in the opening section, only 2 characters are present, bringing about the question of what happened to the rest prior to that point (This leaves room for other of the party's characters to die before that point, and any survivors rejoin the adventure in a later chronological scene, though they are still present in the cut scenes).

I definitely want to do this.